Whether it’s accessing business apps, collaborating on projects or just checking email, the web browser is increasingly becoming the place where employees get their jobs done. In fact, 76 percent of companies employ browser-based email, and 70 percent have adopted browser-based office applications, according to a recent Forrester study.

Since employees spend a lot of time in their browsers at work, we wanted to share some ways you can customize Chrome Browser to help employees stay focused. Chrome Browser has many built-in capabilities that IT admins can use to pre-install bookmarks, apps, and extensions,centrally manage policies, and provide an optimal web browsing experience.

Here are five things IT admins can do with Chrome Browser to help teams work more efficiently.

1. Use Chrome Sync to get fast and easy access across devices.

With Chrome Sync, an employee’s browser history, bookmarks, apps, extensions and even open tabs can follow them from device to device throughout the day—even as they switch across Windows, Mac and Chrome OS platforms. IT can also manage bookmarks centrally through policy, pushing out links to important sites and web apps that users can access from any device when logged into the browser.

2. Help users stay secure through Safe Browsing.

With Safe Browsing, Chrome Browser automatically notifies users when a site may be malicious, so they can avoid it. This means employees can avoid threats that might result in spending hours recovering from an infected device instead of getting things done. IT can allow users to decide if they want Safe Browsing turned on, or they can set a policy centrally to enable or disable it.

3. Block intrusive ads so employees can stay focused.

Intrusive ads can be a drain on anyone’s peace of mind. By enabling Chrome Browser’s automatic pop-up blocker through set policies, IT teams can help employees stay on task without being distracted. Chrome Browser now automatically filters links to third-party websites disguised as play buttons or other site controls, or transparent overlays on websites that capture clicks and open new tabs or windows.

4. Use a standardized homepage for employees.

IT admins can set employees’ homepages to internal sites so they have the latest tools and most up-to-date information. And with Group Policy or Cloud Policy, IT can easily set different homepages for different groups in the organization.

5. Pre-install apps and extensions for easy access and security.

IT admins can make it easy for employees to access the apps and extensions they need to be productive while maintaining the right security policies. They can deploy selected apps and extensions tailored to an employee’s department or role, whether they’re internally built or public, like productivity or CRM apps, giving them easy access to the tools needed to do their work as soon as they open their browser. Visit Device management > Chrome > User Settings in the Admin Console or check out these instructions.

These are just a few ways IT admins can manage Chrome Browser to support user productivity. To get started with managing Chrome Browser for businesses, visit our website. And for information on how to set up, manage and configure Chrome Browser for your enterprise, check out our help center.

Since launching G Suite for Education, we’ve heard a common request from colleges, universities and large school districts: the need for more advanced tools to meet their complex technology needs. In January, we announced G Suite Enterprise for Education, a new edition of G Suite for Education that offers additional enterprise-grade capabilities designed for large institutions and customized for education. Starting today, G Suite Enterprise for Education is generally available to educational institutions in the United States, and is coming to more countries soon.

Additionally, new tools—such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP), security key management and enforcement, and Gmail S/MIME—will start rolling out to all G Suite for Education users over the next few months. G Suite for Education, a suite of tools used by 80M teachers and students, has been and will remain free for schools and we’ll continue to add new features to that edition at no additional cost.

New security features added to free version of G Suite for Education

Admins can expect increased security and greater controls with new tools that are being made available over the next few months to the free version of G Suite for Education:

Gmail and DriveData Loss Prevention (DLP) lets admins prohibit users from sharing sensitive content with people outside their institutions. It checks for sensitive content like personal student information or preset keywords, and alerts admins so they can intervene.

Hosted Gmail S/MIME offers schools an additional line of defense to protect sensitive emails. With this tool, institutions have the option to digitally sign and encrypt emails. In addition, it also adds verifiable account-level signatures authentication to better protect against email spoofing. It’s easy to manage for administrators and seamless for users.

Security keymanagement and enforcement offers an additional layer of security for user accounts by requiring a physical key. Admins can now require faculty, staff and students to use physical keys that use cryptography as a part of 2-step verification when signing into G Suite.

Admins can control session length for users accessing Google services like Gmail and Drive, which means that users will be automatically logged out after a specified amount of time. If specific groups of users require certain session lengths, admins can apply different web session duration settings to different groups.

Enterprise-grade tools for educational institutions

For educational institutions with administrative needs similar to businesses, G Suite Enterprise for Education offers robust tools customized for education. Here’s what users can expect:

Advance your institution with advanced controls

The Security Center in G Suite Enterprise for Education gives organizations more visibility and control over security. To prevent institutions from potential threats, we’re arming IT admins with actionable insights to protect sensitive data against attacks. With security center tools, IT departments gain insights into how data may be exposed with external file sharing, can see phishing messages targeting users within their organization, and access metrics to demonstrate the organization’s security effectiveness.

With Advanced Mobile Device Management (MDM), universities and institutions have scaled control over devices in their domain. Using customizable MDM rules, admins can automate mobile device management tasks, like approving all Android devices that enroll for management at the start of a new school year. Once the rules are in place, pre-specified events trigger actions like sending notification emails to administrators, blocking or approving a device, or even wiping account data from devices if its lost by a student. And with Mobile Audit, admins can see a report of device activities, including device policy compliance.

Enhanced analytics and search capabilities

Cloud Search is coming to G Suite Enterprise for Education soon, and with it, institutions will benefit from a unified search experience across G Suite—powered by machine intelligence. This tool helps educators and students stay on top of schedules, documents and emails, and can even suggest files that need attention. By searching through everything from a lecture presentation to the school corporate directory, users can spend less time searching for information and more time focusing on teaching and learning.

Gmail logs in BigQuery allow institutions to run sophisticated custom queries, conduct deep analysis and build custom dashboards. Gmail logs contain valuable information that can help administrators diagnose issues. The integration with BigQuery makes it easier for administrators to analyze the logs and unlock insights to help they run their organizations.

Collaborate. Coordinate. Communicate.

Advanced capabilities in Hangouts Meet improve internal and external collaboration, allowing for meetings with up to 50 participants and recordings saved to Google Drive. With these communication tools, instructors can save lecture and lesson recordings straight to Drive and collaborate from anywhere.

Since announcing G Suite Enterprise for Education in January, we’ve opted to make the U.S. dial-in feature in Meet available to all business and education customers, and will be rolling it out in the coming months. This lets users join meetings via phone from anywhere, without worrying about poor Wi-Fi connections. With G Suite Enterprise for Education, Meet dial-in is available in dozens of countries, allowing educators to easily connect if their institution has a footprint around the globe.

Get G Suite Enterprise for Education for your institution

If you’re interested in purchasing individual licenses, G Suite Enterprise for Education is $4/user/month for faculty and staff, and $4/user/month for students. If you’re purchasing licenses for all faculty and staff in 2018, we’re offering a special introductory price of $2/user/month for faculty and staff, and free for eligible students. Renewals at the introductory price will be honored for 3 years. Learn more about pricing, renewals, and features for this edition on our Help Center.

Editor’s note: As part of our series of interviews with entrepreneurs across Asia-Pacific who use the internet to grow, we spoke with Aaron Huang, the manager of BeeTouched, a honey business in Taiwan. After he and his cousins took over the family business, Aaron used the internet to build a new brand and spread awareness of Taiwan’s delicious honey. Since it was established in 1982, BeeTouched has grown from 10 to 50 full-time employees.

Please tell us more about BeeTouched.

My family has been in the honey business for three generations. My grandfather was a beekeeper and began selling honey more than 50 years ago. After they inherited the business, my father and two uncles decided to expand it by selling raw honey to other businesses.

Today, I’m proud to run the business with four of my cousins. Our generation decided to establish the company as a unique brand that connected independent beekeepers and consumers, rather than just a honey supplier for other businesses. We may be biased because we hail from a beekeeping family, but we think that beekeepers are really interesting people! Every Taiwanese beekeeper we work with has an inspiring, touching story to share.

The internet allows us to understand and engage our customers better. Tools like Google Analytics help us appreciate our clients’ needs and preferences. With the internet, we are in a better position to give our customers what they want.

The internet has also expanded our ability to reach new audiences in an easy and cost-effective manner. We use YouTube to share videos about our products and the benefits of honey. AdWords has also been a very effective tool. Since we started using it, traffic to our site has increased 40 percent.

How do you think BeeTouched has helped beekeepers in Taiwan?

Keeping bees is hard work. More than a few beekeepers have told me that they do not want their children to follow them in the same line of work. By providing beekeepers with a predictable and regular demand for honey, we hope that we make their livelihoods more stable. BeeTouched is also passionate about promoting Taiwanese honey as a unique product for consumers to enjoy rather than raw material for a factory line. Over the years, I think we’ve managed to persuade consumers that it’s worth it to pay a bit more for good Taiwanese honey. Every year, the Taiwanese beekeeper association gives us a certificate to thank us for our efforts.

Beekeepers tend to the apiaries which supply BeeTouched’s honey in Taiwan

What’s next for your business? Do you plan on expanding at home or overseas?

We have over 10,000 registered customers on our site. Thanks to the Internet and Google, we’ve already been able to export honey to the United States, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Hong Kong. We’re excited to export honey to more countries and we are also exploring the possibility of working with beekeepers from other parts of the world.

Imagine a world of abundance—a world where products are infinitely recycled and the design process itself begins with considering the health and well-being of people and the environment. Imagine those products flowing through an economy that is both profitable and stems depletion of raw materials. That’s the world we want for all of us, and Google is working with the experts who are getting us there.

This vision is embodied in a model called the circular economy—and achieving it requires changing our relationship to natural resources, as well as engagement from designers, material scientists, chemists, policy makers, industry partners and consumers. It requires the development of new materials and processes that optimize for human and environmental health, and capture more value from materials by keeping them in use longer.

Today, we published a joint white paper with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to share a vision for how safer chemistry and healthy materials are essential to unlocking the circular economy. For the past two years, we’ve partnered with The Ellen MacArthur Foundation on a range of circular economy issues and initiatives, and today’s paper is the next step in this partnership. It’s also the culmination of more than a decade of hands-on experience at Google in driving safer chemistry and healthy material innovation across supply chains.

Our Real Estate and Workplace Services team has been working to remove toxins from materials in our built environment for years. It started when we were opening new spaces and started asking questions about the “new space smell,” like carpeting and paint. The answers (or lack thereof) told us that we needed to do more to ensure that our expanded spaces were healthy and sustainable for our employees—and that the manufacturers we were working with knew what was in their materials.

At the same time, our consumer hardware business—like Pixel and Google Home—is rapidly expanding. The growth of our consumer hardware business means that we aren’t just applying this approach to building materials, but also to the manufacturing of consumer tech products, like phones and smart speakers. It also means that we have a responsibility to understand and address the impacts associated with material selection, production, transportation, use, serviceability and the recycling of our products.

We take this responsibility seriously, not only because it’s part of who we are at Google, but because we believe we must do so if we are going to realize sustainable, profitable enterprise. That’s why we’re investing in the creation and adoption of safer chemistry and healthy materials, and working to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.

When Ben Kacyra watched on TV as the Taliban destroyed 1,500 year-old Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001, he felt compelled to do something. Mr. Kacyra, who happens to be one of the creators of the world’s first three-dimensional laser scanning system, realized that his technology could be used to record monuments at risk of damage due to natural disasters, war, or tourism, so that they could be preserved for future generations.

He founded CyArk, a non-profit that has created the world’s largest and most detailed 3D digital archive of endangered wonders of the world—a lasting record of monuments at risk of disappearing. Now, Google Arts & Culture has partnered with CyArk to open up access to their virtual wonders and share their stories with everyone.

The Ananda Ok Kyaung temple, in Bagan, Myanmar remains closed to visitors due to the damage from a 2016 earthquake. You can now virtually step inside and discover its famous wall paintings.

With modern technology, we can capture these monuments in fuller detail than ever before, including the color and texture of surfaces and the geometry captured by laser scanners with millimeter precision in 3D. These detailed scans can also be used to identify areas of damage and assist restoration efforts.

Eim Ya Kyaung in Bagan, Myanmar. The temple was built in 1242 and was damaged by an earthquake.

The image above shows a structure in Bagan, Myanmar, where a 2016 earthquake damaged many of the city’s famous temples. Before disaster struck however, CyArk’s team had scanned and photographed the site—inside and outside, from the ground and from above. Using the data they collected, we reconstructed Bagan’s key monuments in 3D so you can now travel through this breathtaking place and even step inside the temples using a computer, smartphone or virtual reality viewer like Daydream.

As part of this new online exhibition you can explore stories from over 25 iconic locations across 18 countries around the world, including the Al Azem Palace in war-torn Damascus, Syria and the ancient Mayan metropolis of Chichen Itza in Mexico. For many of the sites, we also developed intricate 3D models that allow you to inspect from every angle, using the new Google Poly 3D viewer on Google Arts & Culture.

Over the past seven years, we’ve partnered with 1,500 museums in over 70 countries to bring their collections online and put more of the world’s culture at your fingertips. This project marks a new chapter for Google Arts & Culture, as it’s the first time we’re putting 3D heritage sites on the platform.

To help the work of restorers, researchers, educators and the entire community working to preserve our cultural heritage, we’re opening up access to the source data collected by CyArk from around the world. Now anyone can apply to download the data, with the help of the Google Cloud Platform.

In the Middle East and North Africa, only 38 percent of youth believe their education gives them the skills they need to enter the workforce. By 2020, one in five jobs in the Arab world will require digital skills that aren’t widely available today. Many women are contributing to the innovation coming out of the Arab world, yet this region has among the lowest female economic involvement globally.

To address the growing skills gap in the region’s workforce, and to help ensure that opportunities created by technology are available to everyone, we’ve launched Maharat min Google (the English translation is “Building Capabilities with Google”). It’s an initiative to help Arabic speakers, specifically women and young people, get ready for future job opportunities, advance their careers, or grow their businesses. Maharat min Google will provide free courses, tools and in-person digital skills training to students, educators, job seekers and businesses. The online platform includes over 100 lessons and explanatory videos covering a range of digital marketing skills including search engine marketing, social media, video, e-commerce and more.

All over the Arab world, people use digital skills to realize their goals. We’ve created a series of short films that follow the journeys of six Arab women who have become entrepreneurs, women’s rights advocates and ground-breaking YouTube creators. They show how technology has helped them overcome obstacles, enabled them to forge their own paths and inspire other women to do the same by learning digital skills.

We’re proud to support nonprofits that are teaching Arab youth the skills they need to succeed in an increasingly digital economy. INJAZ Al-Arab, a nonprofit that connects Arab youth to trainings and job opportunities, will use a $1 million grant from Google.org to help 100,000 high school and university students—particularly women and underprivileged students in rural areas—expand their digital skills through hands-on training across the region.

We’re also collaborating with MiSK Foundation to provide in-person digital skills training to over 100,000 people in Saudi Arabia with a target of 50 percent female participation. Our new collaboration will open up a wider range of career opportunities for women and young people to use key digital skills that they’ve learned from the courses.

Technology is a toolkit filled with opportunities—and Maharat min Google aims to help Arabic speakers around the world put those tools to work. We’re partnering with governments, universities, private-sector businesses and nonprofits to help more people take advantage of what the web has to offer.

Today, the majority of the internet is supported by digital advertising. But bad ad experiences—the ones that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you get to the page—are hurting publishers who make the content, apps and services we use everyday. When people encounter annoying ads, and then decide to block all ads, it cuts off revenue for the sites you actually find useful. Many of these people don’t intend to defund the sites they love when they install an ad blocker, but when they do, they block all ads on every site they visit.

Last year we announced Funding Choices to help publishers with good ad experiences recover lost revenue due to ad blocking. While Funding Choices is still in beta, millions of ad blocking users every month are now choosing to see ads on publisher websites, or “whitelisting” that site, after seeing a Funding Choices message. In fact, in the last month over 4.5 million visitors who were asked to allow ads said yes, creating over 90 million additional paying page views for those sites.

Over the coming weeks, we’re expanding Funding Choices to 31 additional countries, giving publishers the ability to ask visitors from those countries to choose between allowing ads on a site, or purchasing an ad removal pass through Google Contributor. Also, we’ve started a test that allows publishers to use their own proprietary subscription services within Funding Choices.

How Funding Choices works

Funding Choice gives publishers a way to have a conversation with their site visitors through custom messages they can use to express how ad blocking impacts their business and content. When a visitor arrives at a site using an ad blocker, Funding Choices allows the site to display one of three message types to that user:

A dismissible message that doesn’t restrict access to content:

A dismissible message that counts and limits the number of page views that person is allowed per month, as determined by the site owner, before the content is blocked.

Or, a message that blocks access to content until the visitor chooses to allow ads on the site, or to pay to access the content with either the site’s proprietary subscription service or a pass that removes all ads on that site through Google Contributor.

On average, publishers using Funding Choices are seeing 16 percent of visitors allow ads on their sites with some seeing rates as high as 37 percent.

Ad blockers designed to remove all ads from all sites are making it difficult for publishers with good ad experiences to maintain sustainable businesses. Our goal for Funding Choices is to help publishers get paid for their work by reducing the impact of ad blocking on them, and we look forward to continuing to expand the product availability.

Security experts recommend strong, unique passwords for each service that you use. For most of us, however, it can be difficult to manage credentials across multiple websites and apps, especially if you’re trying to keep track of everything in your head.

In Android 8.0 Oreo, we made it simpler to use Autofill with a password manager, like LastPass, Dashlane, Keeper, or 1Password. Particularly on tiny devices like your phone, autofill can make your life easier by remembering things (with your permission), so that you don’t have to type out your name, address, or credit card over and over again.

With the new autofill services in Oreo, password managers can access only the information that’s required in order to autofill apps, making your data more secure. There’s a specific list of password managers (which you can find in Android Settings) that meet our security and functional requirements, and we’ll be continuing to grow this list over time. If you already use a password manager, then you’ll be able to try the new experience today.

How does it work?

Setting up Autofill on your device is easy. Simply go to Settings, search for “Autofill,” and tap “Autofill service.” If you already have a password manager installed, it will show up in this list. You can also tap “Add service” to download the password manager of your choice from the Play Store.

Once you’ve set a password manager as your Autofill service, the information stored in that app will show up in Autofill whenever you fill out forms (for example, your saved username and password will show up as a suggestion when you’re logging into an app for the first time).

We include Google as an autofill service on all devices running Android 8.0 and above, which lets you use data that you already have saved in Chrome to fill in passwords, credit cards, addresses, and other personal information.

Language and input settings

Autofill service settings: here you can pick the app that you would like to use as your Autofill service

Whether you use Google or another password manager from the Play Store, the new Autofill experience on Oreo makes it easier to securely store and recall commonly typed information, like passwords and credit card numbers.

Hello, this is Will Robinson of the 24th Colonist Group. My family and I were headed to Alpha Centauri when we accidentally crash-landed on an unfamiliar planet. Mom, Dad, Penny, Judy and I trained for this mission and had all of the provisions for a long trip but … it hasn’t quite turned out as planned.

Our spaceship, the Jupiter 2, is sinking in ice, and we could really use some help. Everyone’s trying to be brave, but I think we’re all pretty scared. It helps that my new robot warns me when there’s trouble—so far the only thing he says is “Danger, Will Robinson!” but I don’t think it’s enough to get us out of here.

That’s where you come in. Luckily, the wiring in our spaceship still works, so we’re able to communicate with Earth. You can radio me on your Google Home to give us a hand. Just say, “Hey Google, play the Lost in Space Game,” and I’ll answer right away.

If you can give my mom some tips on how to melt ice around the spaceship, decode scrambled messages from The Resolute (our spaceship) for Dad, help Penny escape from alien creatures, and give Judy directions while she’s searching for fuel—you might just be able to help us get off this planet.

Over and out.Will

P.S. You can follow all of our adventures from your home planet. Just say, “Hey Google, play Lost in Space on Netflix”, to watch from your TV. (You’ll need a Netflix subscription.)

If you’re a pet owner, you probably live every day like it’s National Pet Day. But to honor the holiday today, we’ve put together a few pet-tential ways you can celebrate them with Google Photos:

1. A photo book of your pet, created just for you

Starting this week, if you take a lot of photos of your cat or dog, the Google Photos app may automatically create a photo book starring your pet. We use machine learning to save you time by selecting the best photos of your four-legged friend and laying them out in a photo book. For those of you in the U.S. or Canada, all you have to do is decide if you want a hardcover or softcover book, and then order.

2. Identify popular breeds with Google LensRecently, we made Google Lens preview available in Google Photos across Android and iOS. Now, when you take a photo of an animal—like a cute cat or dog—you can use Lens to help identify its breed and get more information.

3. Create a movie dedicated to your furry friendYour pet may have a leading role in your life, but it’s time to show the rest of the world that your animal is a star. If your pet is ready for a big screen debut, open your Google Photos app, go to the Assistant tab, and click on the movie button. Then, if available, choose the Meow Movie or Doggie Movie option, select your pet, and we’ll compile the best photos of your four-legged pal into a movie, set to pet-themed music.

For the 150th anniversary of the SF SPCA, we put together a special Meow Movie for some of their fabulous felines who need a home. For more information, visit https://www.sfspca.org/.

4. Label your pet to easily find photos of themIn most countries, you can label your cats and dogs so that you can search to quickly find photos of them. Or even better, you can find photos of that one time you dressed them up for Halloween by searching “Oliver hat” or pictures of them in the park by searching “Oliver park.”

5. Search by breed and emojiSpeaking of fast ways to find photos of your pets, you can also search by breed, species, or emoji—tryor. Quickly search “pitbull” to rediscover photos of your sister’s cute canine, or “gecko” to pull up pics of that cool lizard your friend has.

Howevfur you pampurr your pets, we hope you can try out a few of the features that Google Photos has to off-fur.